New Journalism

New Journalism, American literary movement in the 1960s and ’70s that pushed the boundaries of traditional journalism and nonfiction writing. The genre combined journalistic research with the techniques of fiction writing in the reporting of stories about real-life events. The writers often credited with beginning the movement include Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese.

As in traditional investigative reporting, writers in the genre immersed themselves in their subjects, at times spending months in the field gathering facts through research, interviews, and observation. Their finished works were very different, however, from the feature stories typically published in newspapers and magazines of the time. Instead of employing traditional journalistic story structures and an institutional voice, they constructed well-developed characters, sustained dialogue, vivid scenes, and strong plotlines marked with dramatic tension. They also wrote in voices that were distinctly their own. Their writing style, and the time and money that their in-depth research and long stories required, did not fit the needs or budgets of most newspapers (a notable exception was the New York Herald Tribune), although the editors of Esquire, The New Yorker, New York, and other prominent magazines sought out those writers and published their work with great commercial success. Many of those writers went on to publish their stories in anthologies or to write what became known as “nonfiction novels,” and many of those works became best sellers.

New Journalism and the question of truth

The New Journalists expanded the definition of journalism and of legitimate journalistic reporting and writing techniques. They also associated journalism with fiction when they described their work with phrases such as “nonfiction novel” and “narrative techniques of fiction.” In so doing, they ignited a debate over how much like a novel or short story a journalistic piece could be before it began violating journalism’s commitment to truth and facts.

Some observers praised the New Journalists for writing well-crafted, complex, and compelling stories that revitalized readers’ interest in journalism and the topics covered, as well as inspiring other writers to join the profession. Others, however, worried that the New Journalism was replacing objectivity with a dangerous subjectivity that threatened to undermine the credibility of all journalism. They feared that reporters would be tempted to stray from the facts in order to write more dramatic stories, by, for example, creating composite characters (melding several real people into one fictional character), compressing dialogue, rearranging events, or even fabricating details. Some New Journalists freely admitted to using those techniques, arguing that they made their stories readable and publishable without sacrificing the essential truthfulness of the tale. Others adamantly opposed the use of those techniques, arguing that any departure from facts, however minor, discredited a story and moved it away from journalism into the realm of fiction.

In engaging in the debate over what counts as truth in journalism, the New Journalists were contributing to a wider discussion of the nature of truth and the ability to know and present it objectively in stories, paintings, photographs, and other representational arts. Their works challenged the ideology of objectivity and its related practices that had come to govern the profession. The New Journalists argued that objectivity does not guarantee truth and that so-called “objective” stories can be more misleading than stories told from a clearly presented personal point of view.

Mainstream news reporters echoed the New Journalists’ arguments as they began doubting the ability of “objective” journalism to arrive at truth—especially after more traditional reporting failed to convey the complex truth of events such as McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s, and the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. By 1996 objectivity had been so crippled as a guiding principle that the Society of Professional Journalists dropped it from its ethics code, replacing it with other principles such as fairness and accuracy.

From muckraking to Wolfe, Talese, and Capote

The New Journalists of the 1960s were not the first American journalists to advocate for a more literary approach to writing about contemporary events, nor were they the first to see themselves as representatives of a “new journalism.” Some writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Lincoln Steffens, believed that reporters are morally obligated to write stories that are true, well-crafted, and rhetorically persuasive because they can lead readers to empathize with their subjects and can inspire action against social injustice and abuses of power. Steffens and like-minded colleagues—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and David Graham Phillips—wrote investigative magazine stories in a literary, rhetorically persuasive way. U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 derisively called their type of work muckraking. The social and literary ambitions of those first “new journalists” had a lasting impact on journalism, providing a foundation for generations of investigative and literary reporters and editors who believed in factual, socially committed, and lively journalism—including the New Journalists of the 1960s.

Tom Wolfe was one of the most influential promoters of the New Journalism. Wolfe began his career as a newspaperman in 1956 at The Washington Post and later worked for the New York Herald Tribune, where the example of writers such as Jimmy Breslin demonstrated to him that journalism could be creative and exciting. In 1963, when a newspaper strike in New York City left Wolfe temporarily without work, he turned to his editor at Esquire with an idea: he wanted to fly to California to write about a custom car show and the hot-rod culture. The result was Wolfe’s now-famous “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” (anthologized in his 1964 book by the same name), an energetic piece that became a model of what New Journalism could achieve. In 1973 Wolfe published The New Journalism, in which he explicated the features of the genre. He went on to write several successful books in the style of the New Journalism, including The Right Stuff (1979) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), a biting history of modern architecture.

Although Wolfe received perhaps the most credit for establishing the New Journalism as a literary movement, he himself gave that credit to Gay Talese. Talese began his career while in high school in the 1940s as a reporter for the Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger in New Jersey and, after graduating from college, was hired as a copyboy by The New York Times. In his spare time he wrote stories about ordinary people and places in which most reporters had no interest and offered them to the Times editors, who were impressed with his work. In 1956, after having served a tour of duty with the U.S. Army—during which he continued to write stories for the Times—Talese returned to the paper as a sports reporter. He also wrote for Esquire, producing his most influential stories for that magazine. His two arguably most famous pieces, a profile of Joe DiMaggio titled “The Silent Season of a Hero” and an article on Frank Sinatra, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (both 1966), were anthologized along with his other most popular Esquire pieces in the collection Fame and Obscurity (1970). Talese also used his skills as a literary journalist to write internationally best-selling books, including The Kingdom and the Power (1969), an inside look at The New York Times; Honor Thy Father (1971), about the rise and fall of the notorious Bonanno crime family of New York; Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1980) about the hidden and changing sex lives of Americans; and Unto the Sons (1992), about his own family’s emigration from Italy to the United States in the years before World War II.

Talese did not consider himself a New Journalist but rather a very traditional writer who wanted to “do something that would hold up over time, something that could get old and still have the same resonance.” He also came to associate New Journalism with writers who were more interested in flashiness and celebrity than the hard legwork required of good reporters. Yet Talese admired the work of Wolfe and Norman Mailer, and he influenced many others writers in the genre.

The playwright and novelist Truman Capote became a central figure in the New Journalism in 1965 when The New Yorker magazine serialized Capote’s nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, about the murder of a family of four in their home near Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. Capote spent six years reporting and writing the piece. His aim was to write about real-life events in a way that had the dramatic power, excitement, and intricate structure of a novel. Capote was interviewed extensively about his work in the major national media and, as he described what he did and how he did it, he introduced the idea of the nonfiction novel into popular discourse. He also triggered controversy as skeptical reporters, wary of his attempts to combine fiction and journalism, tried to discredit his claims to accuracy and questioned his assertion that a responsible journalist could write a true story that read like a novel.

The New Journalists’ ideas continue to be explored and refined by new generations of reporters and editors. In the early 1990s the spirit of the movement was reincarnated in a genre called “creative nonfiction.” That movement gained momentum under author and editor Lee Gutkind, who organized an annual creative nonfiction writing workshop at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, helped establish one of the first U.S. degree programs in creative nonfiction, founded the journal Creative Nonfiction, and published several anthologies. In the editorial rooms of newspapers and magazines, in professional journalism organizations, and in creative writing workshops across the United States, writers and editors continued to take inspiration from the New Journalists, experimenting with forms, styles and practices that could work for and give credence to a genre that tries to be simultaneously creative, personal and “true.”